Some portion of my time on DKos is spent hanging with the good people of the BlackKos community. I learn a lot. Not just about inventors, artists, history and the contributions of minorities to our society, but about what to expect.
What do I mean about learning a lot about what to expect? A few weeks back, there was a discussion in the comments thread on BKos about someone being gobsmacked by the virulent racism which has reared up in the wake of President Obama’s ascendancy on the political scene. I was right there with the commenter. I didn’t expect an outbreak of kumbayah, but I didn’t expect this violent hatred either. I certainly didn’t expect a ‘make him a one term president regardless of the cost to the country’ agenda. Unlike the commenter and myself, both of us white, the minority members of BKos shook their heads in understanding. They had known what to expect.
Well, I’ve been living and learning for 55 years, and that’s one of the biggest examples I’ve had of how much more I still have to learn. It’s not like I haven’t had exposure up close and personal to the hatred, racism and discrimination that come with them. I’ve got a bi-racial kid from an interracial marriage. I speak Spanish. Hell, people treat me discriminatorily when they hear me speaking Spanish if they haven’t heard me speak English first. I KNOW that as a white person, I’m privileged. In this case, my privilege kept me from anticipating what in retrospect, should have been an unwelcome, but expected backlash to The President’s election.
Last night, I wrote this diary about the republican obsession with woman-hatred, and the draconian measures they seek to impose upon us as a gender because we have ovaries. In among the comment thread, I realized there has been another thing which I probably should have expected, but again, absolutely did not. And perhaps, there is less excuse for me not to have anticipated this one.
Thirty eight years ago, when I was a late teen, having just celebrated the end of US involvement in VietNam, when I was about to embark on my college studies, my trekking around the world, and generally growing up, Roe v Wade made abortion legal.
Not for one moment did I think that in those ensuing 38 years, females would be the persistent object of a putrid hate campaign which only uses abortion as its excuse. Under the cloak of the abortion issue, the radical right is conducting an agenda to subjugate women, and legislate us into a state of walking fetal carrier. It isn’t just about abortion, it is about limiting access to information, to health services which would prevent pregnancy, and with that lack of information, and restricted access to health care, disease, misery and death are not far behind.
This anti-woman jihad is now far, far, far past the issue of abortion. It is about attempting to remove from a woman's rightful control, excess embryos which she might have had frozen in her desperately loving efforts to have a desired child. It is about 'qualifying' between types of rape, instead of calling rape what it is; a crime against humanity. Like their bretheren in the Taliban, these women haters seek to legislate women into powerlessness.
Believe that to be hyperbole if you wish, but 38 years ago, women reasonably thought we were on the brink of a steady course toward some kind of equality which has only been millennia in the making. I certainly didn’t think that when my daughter was the age I had been then, that there would be an all out assault on women taking place in legislatures across the country and in the capital.
For me personally, that’s an embarrassing major fail in understanding what to expect.
It is a small percentage of people who want to know who is going to step up and assassinate The President and it is a small percentage of women-hating jihadists and their Stockholm syndrome female accomplices who are working tirelessly to turn the clock back years on women by 100 years. But they are tireless. And they are persistent. And they will win if we do not finally, however belatedly, recognize with complete clarity, that racism and women-hatred are siblings in the right ring war to create a permanently oppressed underclass, as they scratch and grovel, pummel and abuse whoever stands in the way of that increasingly small minority keeping a death-hold on power.